Goblins eaten by gators.
The Verge really hates SEO. (Who doesn’t, right?) After that piece I linked to the other day, I found this recent bit which is even betterer.
The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point. When you hear that a 10-foot alligator is going to be released at a rooftop bar in South Florida, at a party for the people being accused of ruining the internet, you can’t quite stop yourself from being curious. If it was a link — “WATCH: 10-foot Gator Prepares to Maul Digital Marketers” — I would have clicked. But it was an IRL opportunity to meet the professionals who specialize in this kind of gimmick, the people turning online life into what one tech writer recently called a “search-optimized hellhole.” So I booked a plane ticket to the Sunshine State.
I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else’s misery?
…
So who ends up with a career in SEO? The stereotype is that of a hustler: a content goblin willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash. A nihilist in it for the thrills, a prankster gleeful about getting away with something.
“This is modern-day pirate shit, as close as you can get,” explained Cade Lee, who prepared me over the phone for what to expect in Florida based on over a decade working in SEO. What Lee said he’s noticed most at SEO conferences and SEO networking events is a certain arrogance. “There’s definitely an ego among all of them,” he told me. “You succeed, and now you’re a genius. Now you’ve outdone Google.”
The more I thought about search engine optimization and how a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm — which, technically, constitutes many algorithms, but we think of as a single force — the more I looked forward to going to Florida for this alligator party. Maybe, I thought, I would get to see someone who made millions clogging the internet with bullshit get the ultimate comeuppance. Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.
"booked a plane ticket to the Sunshine State" which made me think for a second "Queensland" but it was Florida but I stand by my misreading.
That is a really great article, thanks! Longish, but as you said: totes worth a read.
I do wonder what our immediate future will look like though, when the robot SEO engines produce sufficiently coherent gibberish that it rates well under the "Authoritative" ranking, because everything that it says is well-supported by all of these other robot-generated gibberish sites...
Perhaps the internet will devolve into how it was before search engines: you'd accumulate a personal set of "good" links and you'd ask your friends for recommendations...